Crossing the border with Blue Jays beat reporter Jordan Bastian.

Big Mac Attack

You know it’s a slow news day when: The topic of discussion today was John McDonald’s "power surge." I had some fun crunching his home run numbers last night at my hotel (Yes, life on the road consists of late-night number crunching from time to time).

When I informed McDonald today that he was averaging one homer every 27 at-bats since taking over as the full-time shortstop, all he could do was laugh. He was speechless. After all, he was averaging one per 200-something AB’s before he took over at short on July 15.

He said a number of his family members who were watching Friday night’s game kept calling him to joke about his sudden offensive outburst. When he hit his career-best third homer, Toronto PR made sure to have the announcer let everyone in the pressbox know he had reached the personal mark. It was quite funny. Probably one of those things you had to be there for.

Other than that, there’s not a whole lot happening at Blue Jays camp. There will be a little more activity once Chacin is set to come off the DL. Reed Johnson did just hit his ninth homer of the year. How amazing of a year has he had? It’ll be good to see his name pop up on the league leaders for batting average. Entering tonight he was averaging 3.07 PA’s per team games played. He needs 3.1 to qualify. Give it a game or two and he’ll make the cut.

I guess that’s all for right now. It’s the third inning here at the Metrodome and I figured I hadn’t posted in a couple days. I’ll probably blog some more Sunday night before catching a flight to Tampa on Monday morning. Stay tuned…

Towards the end of that road trip, some of the hitters did say they felt like they were pressing — trying to pull the team out of its slump all on their own. So yeah, I guess you could say some of them would agree that they were putting too much pressure on themselves. And yes, it is a much different atmosphere over the last three games. That bad karma that was hounding the Jays during that last trip seems to have worked its way over to the Twins’ side.

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